Juggernaut of Space

Never had the mind of man conceived so horrible a doom as was reaching for Earth. Never had a greater need for Earth's valiant champions been needed. And yet the only ones who could fight the menace—were five futile humans, prisoners on another world.
My name is Robert Rance. You've heard of me, of course—through the recent weird affair of the Crimson Comet, if for nothing else. It seems to me rather ironic: for five years I have been reporting popular science items on the split-wave band of non-visual broadcasting. Station WANA-NYC—the main outlet of Amalgamated Newscasters' Association , for whom I work. I struggled for personal publicity. Then I was plunged—certainly entirely against my will—into the blood-chilling, gruesome adventure which is now popularly known as The Death of the Crimson Comet. Out of it has come publicity beyond my wildest dreams. And now that I've got it, I don't want it. I'm not a hero, of dauntless, fearless courage. I'm not a scientific genius, who has made possible to Earth the New Era of Interplanetary Travel. But I've been called all that by broadcasting asses who are my friends.
I'm just a plain American, who, when his life is in danger gets frightened as the devil, fighting to get himself out of a jam, and with not much thought of anything else. I didn't relish that Crimson Comet business, and I don't want ever to experience anything like it again. I'm not alone in this. There were four others in it with me. They don't like all this public fuss being made over them any more than I do. They weren't heroic. They just tried their best not to get killed. So on their behalf, and my own, I'm writing this narrative of exactly what happened to us. Not the professionally glamorized version which you've heard so many times. Just the facts.
The thing must have been brewing, under cover, for many months. Like a smouldering, unnoticed fire. No one knows; we can only guess at what happened. But looking back on it now, there were incidents, seemingly unrelated at the time, which now I can see were significant. The first of them was in August, 1985—about a year ago. I had just finished a broadcast on some trivial, popular science subject, which I had tried to make sound important to my listeners. And Dr. Johns of the White Mountains Observatory telephoned me. I knew him quite well; he had often steered me into little subjects for my broadcasts, but this, I could see at once, was something different The tel-grid showed his thin face without its usual smile. His grey hair was rumpled; his eyes bloodshot. He looked as though he hadn't slept for much too long.